Simon and the Witch

SIMON AND THE WITCH
Made by: ?
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1987-88

Based on books by Margaret Stuart Barry, this children’s comedy starred Hugh Pollard as Simon, a boy who befriends Elizabeth Spriggs’ fantastically mischievous witch, who actually didn’t do much harm at all. Simon was friends with spiteful schoolgirl Sally (future Eastenders star, Nicola Stapleton) and Cuthbert (Ilan Ostlove), who was rather feeble and lived with his frightfully posh aunt, Lady Fox-Custard (pronounced ‘Folks-Custaard’), played by Joan Simms. Fox-Custard had her own butler, Hopkins, but between them they were unable to thwart the witch and her pranks - in fact, Simon was the sensible one, and had to keep this mad granny-figure in check. Simon and the Witchfun! was twenty five minutes of high-quality after-school entertainment, and it also had a great title sequence, where Simon and the witch held up cardboard placards with the cast and crew’s names on them, and it just looked so much

SQUARE EYES RATING: 5/10

(Thanks to www.tvacres.com for the borrowed pic)

Shoe People

SHOE PEOPLE
Made by: Fairwater Films
Shown on: ITV
Years shown: 1987
Theme tune: “Sh-sh-sh shoooo people, doo be doo be doo be doo…”

The Justin Hayward theme is about the only thing I do remember about Shoe People, except that it was a bit like the equally unexciting Munch Bunch, but used footwear instead of fresh fruit. Basically, it was about a lot of different kinds of shoes, whose type determined their personality. They lived in the back room of the Shoe Repairs Shop, but at night they come to life and the magical Shoe Town appears (someone has been sniffing too much shoe polish, obviously.)

The star of this cartoon was Trampy, a scruffy boot with a detached sole (don’t look for any deeper meaning in this unintentional pun, please), but there was also PC Boot, Wellington, Charlie the clown shoe, Sergeant Major, Sneaker the burglar, Guilder Van der Clog, Flip Flop, Mr Potter , Sid Slipper, Margot the pink ballet slipper and her baby, Bootee.

TVAM was also responsible for the execrable ‘saviour’ of breakfast television, Roland Rat (another creation we can blame Anne Wood for), when they really should have just given us more time with the Green Goddess. Strangely, Shoe People was very popular in the Soviet Union, and the programme's creator James Driscoll even got to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. They must have been yearning for the Berlin Wall to come down so they could get their hands on even more bourgeois capitalist cartoons.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 2/10

(Thanks to www.jedisparadise.co.uk for the borrowed pic)

She-Ra

SHE-RA
Made by: Mattel
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1985

Witnessing the unbelievable success of their product spin-off, He-Man, Mattel launched a new range of toys aimed at girls and a cartoon to accompany it. The series mythology had Angella as Queen of Brightmoon, and her daughter Glimmer, the princess, as the leader of a Great Rebellion. Then along came Adora of Etheria, who was also He-Man’s sister, who had the ability to transform into She-Ra, self-confessed “Princess of Power!”. Move aside Glimmer, here was a real heroine! She-Ra wore a gold head-dress studded with a big red jewel, and she rode into the breach on Swift Wind, a unicorn.

With a whole world of marketing possibilities in front of them, the animators created a range of dynamic support characters, mostly with crap names. There was Frosta, who lived in Castle Chill, in the Kingdom of Snows; Peek-a-Blue, who had a set of eyes in her tail (!) which allowed her to see the future; Double-Trouble, a double-agent (her name was a bit of give-away though, wasn’t it?) who literally had two faces; Mermistra, a mermaid who could turn into a human; and Castaspella, a magician from Mystacor; Sweet-Bea, who just dressed like a bee (possibly related to Buzz-Off, from He-Man.)

Then, there was Flutterina, a weird owl/koala hybrid with butterfly wings, who She-Ra and pals found in a cocoon and, frankly, should have left there.

Naturally, there were some villains to be defeated: there was Catra and her lion called Clawdeen, who had a bright pink perm (the lion, that is); Entrapta, who just sounds untrustworthy; and Hordak, from Horde World.

You probably don’t need to be told that She-Ra was laughably bad, and that each episode was basically the same, but it achieved what it set out to do - it sold a lot of action figures and accessories (Double-Trouble was the best because you could flip between her two faces in a very amusing way) to lot of little girls who thought He-Man was too rough and boyish. Actually, I did prefer He-Man, and used to have a plastic sword which I kept down the back of my jumper in case of an emergency - and I looked better with a blond bobbed haircut as well.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 1/10